IIU amends report into Portage RCMP’s 2023 fatal shooting of teen

A month after a Free Press investigation revealed significant shortcomings in a report into the fatal shooting of a teenager by Portage la Prairie RCMP, the province’s police watchdog has amended the original document.

The Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba announced the changes Tuesday — saying that “certain relevant information was inadvertently omitted” from its final report. In an addendum, the report newly lists the teen’s cause of death and the results of a toxicology analysis, as well as adds a brief detail about a shard of glass the teen had been holding. (While some new information was added to the report, none of the pre-existing text was edited.)

None of the added information was unexpected or revelatory. And the conclusion of the report — that the officer who shot Conor Rae was legally justified in doing so — remains the same. Still, the public admission that information was missing from a report marked an unusual step for the investigative agency.

Rae, 18, was fatally shot on May 24, 2023. RCMP officers were called to an apartment Rae shared with his girlfriend, after he had experienced an adverse reaction to smoking marijuana — a drug with which he had little experience — and had assaulted his partner.

Rae, who had been set to graduate high school in several weeks, had no history with law enforcement, nor history of violence prior to the night he was fatally shot.

The IIU report into Rae’s death took more than a year and a half to be produced, which was then the longest duration in the organization’s 10-year history, involving a fatal shooting by police.

The Free Press investigation determined it was the only IIU report into a fatal shooting by police that failed to include autopsy findings. It was also the rare case where a toxicology report was excluded. The Free Press also reported that IIU’s probe into the teen’s death ran into lengthy delays in interviewing the police witnesses and, in particular, that it took nearly six weeks to interview one of the two officers present when Rae was shot.

The following details were added to the IIU’s nine-page report: “The autopsy report confirmed the cause of death as multiple gunshot wounds.”

“The toxicology report confirmed AP had THC in his system at the time of the shooting. No other intoxicant was noted in AP’s system.” (AP means “affected person,” while THC refers to tetrahydrocannabinol, which is the main psychoactive component in cannabis).

“DNA testing confirmed the presence of AP’s DNA on the shard of glass located beside AP’s body after the incident.”

Rae’s mother Tara said she wished the police oversight body had alerted their family prior to releasing the amendments to the report. Even with the brief additions made, her family still has questions they want to see answered. There are more details they want to know.

“In their words, they said they were punching him and kicking him,” Tara said, referencing information provided by the two RCMP officers to the IIU. “So, how much damage did he take before they ended up shooting him? And how come we don’t get to know that? It says that he died because of multiple gunshots, but it still doesn’t say how many gunshots actually killed him and made contact.”

She also noted that while the addendum says that her son’s DNA was found on a shard of glass next to him, it still hasn’t been described in detail.

“It says a ‘shard of glass,’ like that could be a sliver of glass, for all we know. We have no idea,” Tara said.

“It was kind of like they looked at it and were like, ‘Oh, yeah, maybe we should have had these things,’ but then they still put in the least amount of information pertaining to those things possible,” she said.

marsha.mcleod@freepress.mb.ca